Noam Shazeer

Thanks for having us.

Super excited to be here.

You're very kind.

I mean, I think as companies grow, you kind of go through these phases.

When I joined, we were 25 people, 26 people, something like that.

And so you eventually learned everyone's name.

And even though we were growing, you kept track of all the people who were joining.

At some point, then you lose track of everyone's name in the company, but you still know everyone working on software engineering things.

Then you lose track of all the names of people in the software engineering group, but you at least know all the different projects that everyone's working on.

And then at some point, the company gets big enough that you get an email that Project Platypus is launching on Friday, and you're like, what the heck is Project Platypus?

So I think...

It is good to keep track of what's going on in the company, even at a very high level, even if you don't know every last detail.

And it's good to know lots of people throughout the company so that you can go ask someone for more details or figure out who to talk to.

I think with one level of indirection, you can usually find the right person in the company if you have a good...

network of people that you built up over time.

How did Google recruit you, by the way?

I kind of reached out to them, actually.

I mean, one of the things I like about Google is our ambition has always been sort of something that would kind of require pretty advanced AI.

You know, organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful.

Like, actually, there's a really broad mandate in there.